Friday, 5 May 2017

SMARTTHINGS

The SMART home poison have ate into me, this is probably the must have if you wish to turn your house into something SMART. Yes, I took the plunge and bought this SMARTTHINGS which comes with a few sensors.

It comes in two different flavors, the US and EU. Be sure to buy the right version or else it will not support the Z-wave frequency of the region that you are in. It is unfortunate that I need the EU version and have to live with the expensive shipping from Amazon UK.

Setting it up is easy, but there is an undocumented IDE website that you will need to visit in order to do the detail configuration of the SMARTTHINGS.

https://graph.api.smartthings.com/

Of course, you will also need to download a phone APP for the convenience. You may add your own phone as a presence sensor as well.

There are also other SMART home controllers, some cheaper, but they are not as flexible and configurable as SMARTTHINGS. They is also a huge community supporting the SMARTTHINGS with their own customized device handlers. Not to mention, the CORE (Community's Own Rule Engine) is quite a must have if you are the hands-on person. That you can install CORE as an add-on APP on the SMARTTHINGS itself.